The present invention relates generally to the area of information processing and, more particularly, apparatus and methods for managing and scheduling time-based information for multiple individuals located at different locations.
Successful management of one's time is a goal that every successful professional must achieve. One's business day may be swept away in a deluge of meetings and appointments, all of which must be somehow managed. An attempt to manage this task on paper, such as with a simple wall calendar, is unworkable for all but the simplest of schedules. More likely, such unsophisticated aids to managing one's time will lead to scheduling conflicts, missed appointments, botched deadlines, and angry clients.
Oftentimes, it is necessary to schedule a group of people for an event, such as a meeting. This is the problem of "group scheduling"--that is, notifying a group of people that a certain event is going to happen and receiving confirmation from members of the group whether each can participate. Conventionally, "group scheduling" has been largely limited to scheduling events for users within a particular "work group." Typically, a "work group" has comprised those users connected together through a local area network (LAN). Alternatively, a "work group" can be extended to users who can receive messages. In this extended group, however, manual processing on the part of the user is typically required. For instance, for a user who connects from a remote location, the user is required to manually process messages received to manually update the calendaring product to update one's scheduling status information. This leads to two disjointed activities for the user: (1) retrieving messages and (2) entering/processing scheduling information.
With the ever increasing importance of the Internet, work groups are no longer confined to local area networks, or even wide area networks (WANs). Instead, people are connected together via electronic mail or "e-mail." At the same time, however, users have become accustomed to the ease which automatic scheduling systems provide, such as those which operate within a proprietary environment (e.g., Novell Groupwise.RTM. operating on a Netware.RTM. local area network). If users are not connected to the same proprietary system (e.g., Novell Groupwise), then the users must resort to a manual scheduling process. Here, the job typically falls to a secretary or administrative assistant who must contact each proposed participant individually, for determining his or her availability. Typically, the person charges with scheduling the event must "negotiate" with the proposed participants for reaching a time when the meeting can finally happen. The process is still not complete, however. A confirmation message must be sent to all proposed participants for confirming the final time.
What is really needed are system and methods which permit any user to schedule appointments with a group of other users in an automated fashion, but without requiring the users of the group to employ or be connected to a particular proprietary system. In particular, such a system should allow a user to initiate a message to invite a group of people to a meeting (i.e., to schedule a meeting). Those individuals should, if they are able to receive electronic mail, be able to participate in the group scheduling. Here, the recipients need not have access to any particular proprietary software for participating in the group scheduling. Instead, each participant need only be able to receive and send e-mail (which can be done using a wide variety of products, from numerous vendors.) The present invention fulfills this and other needs.